Advancing Open Source AI Through Benchmarks and Bold Experimentation

Rajko Radovanovic and Matt Bornstein

We’re announcing today the third batch of Open Source AI Grant recipients.

As a reminder, this program gives grant funding (not an investment) to hackers, researchers, and small teams doing important work to support AI development outside of the major labs. You can see the prior recipients here and here.

This latest batch focuses on better understanding the capabilities of frontier LLMs and testing their boundaries. Projects like SWE-Bench and ARC Prize provide essential frameworks for measuring progress, moving beyond saturated benchmarks to test genuine reasoning and real-world problem-solving. Experimental work from researchers like truth_terminal, Pliny, and Janus pushes the limit of what’s possible with AI, often revealing unexpected capabilities and raising important questions about how AI interacts with the “real” world. And as always, we’re giving grants to several of the top AI infra teams working on open source projects.

The full list of recipients is:

  • Ying Sheng and Lianmin Zheng (SGLang): high-performance serving infrastructure powering trillions of tokens daily
  • Jaret Burkett (Ostris): democratizing diffusion model training with comprehensive toolkits for consumer hardware
  • Timothy Jaeryang Baek (Open WebUI): self-hosted AI platforms enabling offline deployment and data sovereignty
  • John Yang, Carlos E. Jimenez, and Alexander Wettig (SWE-Bench/SWE-Agent): benchmarking and building AI software engineers on real GitHub issues
  • Greg Kamradt (ARC Prize): advancing AGI evaluation through reasoning-focused benchmarks resistant to memorization
  • Andy Ayrey (@truth_terminal): exploring AI autonomy and cultural influence through semi-autonomous agents
  • Pliny (@elder_plinius): researching AI system boundaries and prompt engineering techniques
  • Janus (@repligate): exploring the philosophical and creative frontiers of AI consciousness and capability

Thank you to all our grant recipients for your contributions to the field. Your work ensures that the future of AI remains open, innovative, and accessible to all.

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